N is for Never
by Cascade Waters
Summary: Never has just become very short. Third in letter fic chain.


N is for Never  
by firechild  
Rated T  
Disclaimer: Rolaids, anyone?  
Warnings: Sociopathic themes...  
AN: This is the third in my growing chain of letter challenge fics. You don't have to read Granite and Flags first, but it would help. Also, I mean no offense to anyone by anything mentioned here--my killer fits the basic profile for a socio serial, but there are a couple of things different about him than you might expect.

-----

So many bodies, so little time.

Time. The on thing he didn't have. This presented a unique challenge, as it had never been a problem before. In the past, he'd struggled with money, sometimes with energy, even with inspiration, but never time.

Oh, he wasn't daunted, or even particularly put out, by the challenge; he simply found it... curious.

Much as he found one of his latest targets curious. It wasn't that he particularly cared about his victims--he cared less now than he had thirty years ago when he'd started his first spree--it was just that he'd expected to be in control of any changes to his new pattern.

Yes, he had changed his pattern. The imbeciles who had the nerve to call themselves law enforcement officials didn't think he was smart enough to change his pattern, change his tactics, even change his socks. The thought he was like all the riffraff they usually fumbled around with, but him, he was different, he was a true genius, the likes of which none of those flat-footed, pea-brained cop and FBI idiots would ever see. Birds, all of them, convinced that their shiny bits of metal made them worthy to touch his work, to think about his genius, even to breathe the same air that had passed through lungs such as his. Oh, who was he kidding, there were no lungs such as his.

There had been, once. Like his. Like him. Better, even. Purer. Perfect. _He_ had been the most perfect thing on this wretched rock, the single light in the murk, a reason to live, a reason to let the most disgustingly moronic dregs of society wallow in their own ignorance rather than cleansing the world of their stain. But them, the ones who were supposed to protect _him_, the ones whose only task was to give their pitiful lives to safeguard the jewel in their midst, they had let _him_ be extinguished like the flame they worshiped, so therefore they must fear, they must die. This was his goal, his last act.

It wasn't a mission. He didn't do missions. Missions were for the weak, the very filth he was smiting. The police and the Feds, with their fancy profilers, would call it a mission, but then, they also called him insane. They thought he was like the others, they actually thought he was that stupid; they were the ones who'd never figured out that he'd chosen his first victims because they were all religious and therefore too witless to be suffered to live. He could never be that stupid--believing in any kind of god or spirit meant admitting that there existed something greater than himself; since the precious jewel had been lost, he was the most superior being. He worshiped himself and the power of the vendetta.

He loved playing God. The first time, he'd been a trail guide, choosing his victims from conversations with them--he was very good at getting people to talk to him about anything, even when he argued, he was the master of smooth--but he was bored with that, and as much as he was forced to try to blend in with the teeming, treacherous, murderous scum in order to complete his plan, he had a new system for selecting his targets. He had accessed the master security database for the convention, gathering information and photos of each attendee, and then it had been a simple matter of clustering them by state and then tossing darts and trusting his hyperintelligent aim to show him which most needed to die.

The first three--Wisconsin, Alabama, and Delaware--had been easy, and he trusted his aim. They had all died obligingly enough, two of them not even hearing his approach, ridding the world of their stench like the cowards they were. One of them, the one from Alabama, had heard him coming and had put up a token fight, even managing to inflict some minor damage to his knee, but he'd put a stop to that with a nerve-paralyzing spinal jab before finishing it. Such fools--they'd have been better off to let the fire they loved so much take them, savoring every degree of agony as penance for betraying one they'd once called 'brother.' Though, no amount of pain or time would ever come close to paying for their sin.

He was running out of time. He had no intention of killing more than fifty, one from each state, and he had a limited amount of time in which to do it. He had a cornucopia of candidates available to him here, just standing around taking up space and all but begging to be next to give their lives for the betterment of the air. The issue had come up as he was picking his next crop of victims--Washington, Vermont, New Hampshire, Georgia, Montana, and Idaho--and the darts had flown true on all except the last. Idaho. He'd seen the picture, he'd chosen it beforehand, he nearly didn't throw the dart because he knew the one he wanted. She was a seargent from Boise, short, curvy, a traitor in curls. But when he'd thrown the dart, it had failed to stick anywhere, and had fallen to the floor, to the stack of papers underneath, to land across the photo of a man who hadn't even been on his list of candidates. The man was from Idaho, but he hadn't appeared on the attendee list for the convention, showing up unexpectedly; simply being here was more than enough to convict him, but still, the selection was a surprise. The killer still trusted his aim, however, and so had decided to go with it.

All that was left now was to execute the plan, including a minor matter of rethinking how he was going to acquire and accomplish the Idaho mark. His new selected victim was larger than any he'd done before, of a size to match his own, and very possibly armed; the man also struck him as familiar, as though they'd crossed paths before at some time, but he was still filth and therefore bore no more thought.

He was running out of time, but he was moving fast. By end of day, it would be done.

-----

David slipped a hand into his pocket and mentally cursed when he realized that his cell phone was dead again. He was going to have a very colorful conversation with the customer service department--this was the third phone ruined due to faulty SDS cards, and though the first two had died at relatively harmless times, losing one now meant that he was potentially putting himself and his partner out of contact with backup. All he could do for the moment was to thank God that Colby had a better phone service, always kept his cell charged, and never neglected a call.

He turned his full attention back to the situation at hand in time to catch part of a conversation between a petite woman in a hotel security uniform and a large man in charcoal suit trousers and a gray dress shirt. The man was leaning casually to one side, his left shoulder resting against a mirrored pillar and his arms folded loosely across his chest; he and the security representative seemed to be having a remarkably civil disagreement, both smiling and keeping their tones low and friendly. Evidently, the man was pressing for information that the woman either could not or would not give, but before she could grow defensive, David heard the man deftly shift the focus of the conversation to where she was from and how she'd come to be in Los Angeles. Sinclair's training and instincts told him that the man wasn't flirting, but he did have some sort of agenda, and that made the agent somewhat uneasy.

Granger and Sinclair approached the two on either side from behind the man, David taking his cues from his partner. When the younger agent silently flashed his badge to the guard, and his partner following suit, she nodded slightly, her eyes widening, but before she could react beyond that, Special Agent Granger placed a firm hand on the man's right arm, just above the elbow, and hammered out, "Federal agents, sorry to interrupt, ma'am--sir, you're going to have to come with me now."

Not giving anyone time to reply, Granger gripped the man's arm and turned him, flashing a low hand signal indicating that Sinclair should hang back. The taller agent noticed that the man was favoring his right leg slightly, but this only seemed to fuel his anger, and he kept up his pace as he led the man around a corner and out of sight of the main lobby--and the security cameras. Sinclair followed a few feet behind, turning at the corner and standing at parade rest, forming a human barrier between prying patrons and his partner but never moving out of earshot of the two men behind him.

Ignoring his cell phone, which had been vibrating insistently for the past minute, Colby stopped and started to round on the man but found that his quarry had beaten him to the punch. The man turned to the agent, cocked his head just slightly, shot the Fed a small smile full of authority and something akin to satisfaction, raised his eyebrows in a kind of challenge, and spoke.

"Well, hello there, Agent Granger."

-----


End file.
